Well, while King was talking to the choir at Berkely, people like Ella Baker were in North Carolina and Fannie Lou Hamer were in Mississippi...and the lunch counter protests weren't organized by King either.

Baker eventually quit SCLC and moved over to join SNCC, which was far more progressive than SCLC, especially when it came to treating women and poor, non-college educated black activists as equals. That simply never happened in SCLC.

In truth, it was SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, and some others who put women and poor blacks in leadership positions. They were the true progressives of the civil rights movement, IMO. King, the SCLC, and the NAACP were far more patriarchal, top down, church father dominated, and that really didn't reflect the spirit of the 60s. They were beholden to white funders and thinking strategically about the longevity of their organizations. So they were really opposed to the direct action tactics completely. SNCC never intended to be an organization with longevity. It intended to be, and was, a force that used direct action and civil disobedience to get society to change, not just the laws.

In that sense, they were part and parcel of the direct action movements for political AND economic AND social change that was the zeitgist of the truly progressive movements for change that came out of the 60s, including the early second wave of the feminist movement (before they ran the women of color and poor and working poor women out of it) and the environmental movement (before it moved to K Street and got cozy with Congress) and the Chicano(a)/Latino(a) movements for immigrant farm workers, etc.

SNCC and the Black Panthers did though, as the strong ties between those two orgs and the Black Arts movement demonstrated. It was very much in the same spirit as the radical New Left among white, Latino, and Asian students and poor whites being drafted into the war.

King, SCLC & the NAACP, if you understand the timeline of the civil rights movement and it's movers and shakers, were pretty much passed by, and on the verge of becoming irrelevant to the movement by the time King came out against the war and on the side of poor black workers. People simply don't realize just how silent King was between the passage of the Voting Rights Act (which didn't actually result in SCLC registering many voters in the south at all) in 1964, and his push over the cliff by the radical New Left to come out against the war on the poor and in Vietnam.

Berkely wasn't the center of the universe, it was just handful of white students and a couple of faculty who all were there at the time that the Voting Rights Act was being pushed through Congress, who thought of themselves that way. That certainly wasn't the way Berkely was seen in Greensboro or Chicago or Memphis, by blacks or whites.

What year was Medgar Evers assassinated? Malcolm X? Did the SNCC kids sit down at the Greensboro lunch counter? Remember, these kids were the first in their families to get to college, and they were being expelled for participating in the sit-ins. Many black families throughout the south depended upon white patronage to keep their jobs and their families together. Parents of those kids paid a price for "not keeping their children in line" in ways their white patrona approved.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not claiming King wasn't an important leader, or largely influential. But to say that SNCC followed in King's and the SCLC's footsteps just isn't accurate or true. It is a lot more complicated than that. (BTW, the first sit-in in Greensboro was in 1960)

I'm with Azizi. It's all about Martin and Rosa and kumbayah these days. No mention of the fact that it was a woman--Ella Barker--who was the face of SCLC in North Carolina. There is a good reason why she left misogynist SCLC, and joined forces with SNCC.

Freedom Summer & the Freedom Schools--that was SNCC, not SCLC or NAACP or CORE. The SDS, the American Indian Movement, etc all modeled themselves after SNCC.

Mention Fred Hampton or Malcolm X, and you get glares (or worse) from the very conservative black middle class elite these days--both those supporting Obama and Clinton, neither of whom ever mention one word about the poor and oppressed in this country, much less come out against the corporate takeover of the US government.

As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a dime's worth of difference between Hilary and Barak. Or John McCain for that matter. At least Mc Cain has a bit better position on immigration than Obama or Clinton have.